BMW, Clinique and Audi Top Facebook Luxury Brands Ranking

Luxury brands that don’t allow fans to post comments on their Facebook walls score lower for engagement (and “Facebook success”) than those that do.

That’s just one of the findings from a new report that rates the Facebook savvy of 100 luxury brands across Auto, Beauty, Fashion, Watches and Jewelry, and Spirits and Champagnes.

The L2 “Prestige 100″ Facebook report, produced in partnership with Buddy Media, gives top marks to the top three brands on Facebook are BMW, Clinique, and Audi, #1-3 respectively. Each brand was scored against more than 200 qualitative and quantitative data points and ranked across four criteria: Size & Growth, Engagement, Programming and Integration.

Automotive and Beauty brands nabbed the top seven spots in the ranking, with the Watch & Jewelry industry earning the lowest average Facebook IQ.

The Top 10 luxury brands on Facebook, according to the new report:[more]

1. BMW — “The ultimate social machine boasts the highest engagement in Index.” Its “Two Originals” Facebook app, above right, is cited in the report for inspiring original content.

Scott Galloway, the New York University marketing professor who founded L2, a digital innovation think tank, told brandchannel, “There is an entire generation of marketers that approach their brands with a traditional broadcast mentality. Develop a piece of creative, test it, and blast it across relevant channels. Facebook requires a new set of skills. Brands that are successful on Facebook are engaging in two-way communication, responding to fans and opening their pages to comments.”

As for the lack of top brands engaging in Facebook commerce, Michael Lazerow, founder and CEO of Buddy Media (profiled by us earlier this year) told us:

“According to Booz & Company, social commerce will be a $30 billion market by 2015. These aren’t numbers brands can afford to ignore. So, brands will need to identify ways to integrate commerce everywhere their brand lives online.

Buddy Media recently acquired social commerce company Spinback, which gives brands the ability to track social sharing all the way back to specific sales and other conversions. Millions of brands use sharing buttons. Very few of them, however, can actually tell you how many sales were driven by these buttons.”

“Social media is not one size fits all, and brands must adapt their voice and communications strategy for each platform,” adds Galloway.

Key findings from the report’s analysis of luxury brands on Facebook:

• 20% of prestige brands don’t allow fans to post on their wall(s); these brands posted average IQs of 82 versus an average IQ of 107 for brands allowing wall posts.

• Analysis of more than 800 brand wall posts demonstrates that posts about products garnered the highest interaction rates across the study. Posts around contests and promotions registered the lowest interaction rates.

• Luxury brands’ Facebook efforts are poorly integrated across digital platforms. Just over half are promoted on brand sites through share technology, and only 29% incorporate the open graph “like” API.

• None of the Prestige 100 currently engages in Facebook commerce. It is predicted this will be the area of greatest investment over the next 12 months.